


Nostos

by iberiandoctor (Jehane)



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universes, Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M, Non Fix-It, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21916456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: Three times, in three lives, Oliver goes home.
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 26
Kudos: 146
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Nostos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boywonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boywonder/gifts).



> _“This is like coming home, like coming home after years away with Trojans and Lestrygonians, like coming home to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just know — coming home as when everything falls into place.”_

** 1\. After the Engagement **

It took a long time before I realized what he’d done, and why he’d done it. 

I understood not a thing while enmeshed in the thick weeds of my own sorrow that was itself a kind of indulgence, as blind as twice-cursed Tiresias, trudging through the swamps of defiant self-pity into which his last phone call had catapulted me for months and then years; but after my first semester at the Conservatoire de Paris, after my season with Matthias had come to its abrupt end, after the wedding gifts my mother and I sent that fateful summer had found their way back to us in the fall with no accompanying note of explanation, and I'd heard enough from within my father's academic circles to piece together the news that the young Columbia postdoc with the new book out on the pre-Socratics hadn’t gotten married as scheduled, I suddenly understood. 

It wasn’t that he hadn’t loved me, or hadn't loved me enough. 

Naturally I was furious, but I had by then fortunately traveled far enough from my seventeen-year-old self that I didn’t stay angry. More accurately, I didn’t stay the sort of angry that had once frozen out both him and myself and almost wasted the better part of our summer together. 

I could have written him a letter. I should have called ahead.

Instead, I flew to New York City in the spring.

He’d given the address to my father, who maintained an active correspondence with all our residents: a modest walk-up on the Upper West Side, facing the Hudson. 

I arrived in the city on a weekday evening, at an hour at which classes and the most conscientious after-class administrative work would be long over. And if there had been after-class extracurriculars, tutoring of a different kind? I did not allow myself to consider the possibility. 

I could have visited his afternoon lectures, or gone to his office on the Morningside Heights campus. I should have remained in Paris and tried to make it work with Matthias. And if I’d followed what I could have or should have done, my life’s course would have been vastly different. 

He almost looked the same. His hair was shorter than it had been that summer; in place of the unbuttoned shirt collar and short shorts and tanned skin, he wore a blazer and striped button-down and navy wool vest. His cheek and palms and the narrow sliver of skin at his neck were now all the same pale almost-pink as if never exposed to the sun, save for the one or two sunspots on the backs of his hands which belied this conceit. No ring on his finger, which was a relief. 

No other person in residence, either, the possibility of which hadn't struck me until then, standing in his narrow hallway, while he opened and closed his mouth, for once at a loss for words, and considered whether to let me in.

Propriety won out. I was admitted past the threshold into the living room and then the balcony, with its view of the George Washington Bridge and the river. Manhattan was full of rain at this time of year, a fitting backdrop for a long-held-back deluge.

"You called off the wedding?"

He’d never breathed a word about her, even though when we were together it had already been off and on for two years. I assumed that, in the same way, he hadn’t told her about me, either.

“I couldn’t do it, in the end. It wasn’t fair to her.” He didn’t say, it also wasn’t fair to you, but I understood.

I didn’t say, Why didn’t you come to find me afterwards? Because I understood this as well. 

“I’d like a drink,” I told him instead; I was now old enough to drink in the state of New York. He fetched me a grappa, the kind we had last drunk together on the streets of Bergamo; I took a sip and was transported back to those cobbled streets, the damp _ferragosto_ afternoon filled with motes of gold and suspended time. I watched his face; it could have been a trick of the light, but I could have sworn he felt it too.

He congratulated me on my various achievements. I felt gratified that he had clearly kept abreast of even insignificant details of my career. And to think that, not so long ago, I had assumed he had forgotten me.

As we neared the bottom of the grappa bottle and the close of the rainy evening, he started to dart fitful glances towards the backpack that I’d discarded beside the sofa, and I found myself reaching out to grasp hold of his chin, to keep his attention focused on me.

“How long am I going to have to wait for you?” 

I meant, of course, How can I convince you that I’m now ready for you, that you were right to leave me then, that you have nothing to be forgiven for, that I’ve learned to live without you, but at the same time that your body has marked mine and you’ve ruined me forever for other lovers that will never be enough because they aren’t you? 

He lifted his pale blue eyes to mine, the color of the longed-for morning sky above Crema. “Until I can be sure it’s what you need, and not just what you want. I’ve done enough harm as it is.”

He meant: to his ex-fiancée as well as to me. He was still plagued by what would have been the right, the decent thing to do. Such nobility. I wanted to smack the patronizing moue from his wide, pink mouth. I wanted to gift-wrap his guilt, his dogged vigilance, and deliver it to my younger self as a revelation.

“What about what you want?”

At first, he let me hold him, a conciliatory hug that turned into the famished embrace of two, three, four years. With my unabashed touch, with my mouth, I tried to convince him of the ration of the divine that had been given to us years before. We had found the stars, he and I, that summer, and this spring evening we tried across years and time to find them again. 

What we found was something new — as my fingers slipped easily into his body and as he lowered his guard and spread himself for me and muttered imprecations in a throaty voice that I’d never heard him use before, I continued to press my suit with my cock. 

He was the best person I had ever known, and I knew I needed to convince him not to let me wait any longer, that he was what I needed to complete my life. 

Come home, I told him, afterwards; to where it’ll be hot and there will be no shade, to the house by the sea where there are fields of wild lavender and orchards of peaches and ripening apricots waiting to be plucked. The pool where we used to swim, the belfry nicknamed To-Die-For that you never let me show you, the gate that leads down to the rocky beach. Where we can see if what was given to us that summer can be given to us again. 

“You owe me this much, at least. Come home, Elio.”

He hesitated. There were many reasons not to. But I could see it in his eyes: the fear and the excitement that comes from finally sighting, after a lengthy journey, landfall on the horizon at last. “All right, Oliver. I will.”

** 2\. The Affair **

“Come over for a drink, for dinner, tonight, now, meet my wife, my boys, please, please, please. I need to leave something in the office first, and we’ll go.”

“You don’t understand. I’d love to. But I can’t.”

He had never forgiven me. Of course he said he had, he said he remembered good things only. But he had absolutely no reason to. I let myself take his love when he was seventeen, and then I married someone else.

He said, “The truth is, I don’t think I could feel nothing. And if I were to visit your home, to meet your family, I’d prefer to feel nothing.”

Our home, our small college town in fall colors — long, languorous sunsets, orange East Coast hills, the beginning of the school year, the promise of summer behind us. The boys bent over their homework, practice-muddied boots at the door. Micol, who would have assumed this was another colleague interested only in Greek triremes and Greek fire, Homeric similes and Greek theoretical figures in modern authors. She’d never asked about Italy, or about any of the other loves I’d had before, or since.

This was the parallel life I’d led, to the one I could have had with him.

We had drinks at his hotel instead. A rickety antique along the New Hampshire river. I’d passed by a hundred times and hadn’t realized the shoreline resembled the rocky beach where I’d spent so many sleepless nights that summer, and that one night he joined me on my rock and kissed me on the neck.

We had a third drink. I should have taken my leave then. I could have repeated the invitation to come home with me, to this life I’d chosen — Sonoma wine, dinner, boys, family — and he would have said no, and been on his way.

Instead, we had a fourth, and I told him about the postcard of Monet’s berm. The souvenir mailed to him when he was fifteen by my predecessor, Maynard. I’d written on the back of it, over Maynard’s _Think of me someday_.

“What did you write?”

When I told him — and I’d never said a truer thing to anyone — his eyes went wide. It had been fifteen years, and he suddenly looked as young and helpless as he’d been that last day on the train platform in Bergamo when we said goodbye to each other and to the life that had been there for us. 

“Suppose I did come to dinner,” he said. “What would you tell your wife? _This is the man whose house I stayed in when I lived in Italy fifteen years ago. And by the way, while he wasn’t transcribing Haydn’s Last Seven Words of Christ, he’d sneak into my room and we’d fuck our brains out_? But I don’t suppose she knows about me.” His smile was self-deprecating, almost mocking. “Did you tell her? No, of course you didn’t. Why would you have? It was a summer dalliance. It was never supposed to mean anything.”

“You know how much it meant.” The words were hard to get out. I felt every nerve exposed to his merciless gaze; it was no more than I deserved.

He said, very gently, without rancour: “Then you decided to lie to her. Same as you did to me.” 

He was right, of course. A lie by omission is still a lie in any moral universe, even in Socrates’s. And what of Plato’s wisdom, that the lie in the soul — a lie of the most fundamental aspect of one’s life — is the worst of all? I admitted to that cardinal sin: “I think most of all I was lying to myself.”

With this utterance, he subsided. He took my hand in a confiding clasp, and placed it on his crotch, in exactly the same way as he’d touched me on his berm so many years ago. It had the same effect: I became instantly hard. 

I could feel how hard he’d gotten in his turn, under the layers of fine wool and cotton. I could see the confidence that hadn’t been there fifteen years ago.

“You could have had this instead,” he said. “But you showed me the life that was meant for us, and then told me we didn’t get to have it.”

I’d seen it many times before: our honeymoon in Alexandria, the ancient place where Ephesus, Athens and Syracuse had ended; our home in Rome, or in Paris near the Sorbonne, where he could train, and I could teach, and which we would fill with music and the reckless fire of an artist’s life. I’d even had him visit me many times before: an impish laugh from behind a closed door, or a bare-chested presence, shorts riding high on his thighs as he straddled mine. It was sometimes more real to me than my New England existence.

And now he was here, in the flesh.

_We’re still the same, we haven’t drifted. We can still have that life._

I didn’t take my hand away. I was transfixed on the horns of dilemma. His fingers were warm, and the flesh beneath them seemed almost warmer. 

He’d always been the one to speak first.

“Let me show you what it looks like, Elio. Stay here tonight, with me.” 

I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. I didn’t: because of my boys, and also my marriage. 

In a parallel life, was there an Elio who didn't speak? Another Elio, who might have come home to wife, boys, dinner, lies, and left again? Or an Elio who might have stayed afterwards, if I had finally mustered the courage for the first time to speak in my turn?

Would my small-town life be shattered irretrievably by the revelation, or would we be able to come to some Socratic consensus, the three of us together? Perhaps Micol would blossom under the Italian sun — walking the streets of Bergamo between us, tasting the apricots we would pluck from Anchise’s orchard — if I invited her to share this most closely guarded life, this most closely guarded love. 

I owed her that much, and I owed it also to him.

This was the world in which I made the attempt.

“Will you come home for dinner if I promise to tell her the truth, at last?”

And then what? But Elio had never been lacking in courage or imagination. Or in love, at the end of it. He was one of the best people I had ever known, and he proved it again this evening.

He squeezed me once, gently. Then he removed his hand, and said, “Yes, then. Yes, I will.”

** 3\. The Lighthouse **

He said he would be there only for a day: an overnight visit, on his way from Rome to Menton, as if he’d take a shot in the arm of some bracing restorative, or drink from the fountain of his misspent youth, and then be on his way.

He arrived by cab down the tree-lined driveway, the car stopping more or less at the same place as it had twenty years ago, pebbles crunching under the tires. I had offered to have him picked up from the airport, but he said he wanted to retrace the journey he took that first time, and travel the old familiar roads that remembered him as much as he remembered them, until he reached the old pine alley and my grandfather’s house beside the sea, where it had all started.

 _My life stopped here,_ he could have said. _I never really left. For twenty years I lived half a life, in a quiet New England town where everyone wears snow boots all year round. I never became the person I thought I was and could have been; everyone has known it except me._

I knew how he felt. Because I’d been living one too: a half-life animated by Brahms and Bach, by occasional men and women, by Marzia and Michel, who had told themselves that having only part of me would be enough. 

At first I wasn’t sure why he'd come. I could have told him nothing had changed: that the _orle of paradise_ was still there, that the second highest step in the spiral staircase that led to the attic still creaked, that the world was exactly as he’d left it twenty years ago. I should have signaled that there was no reason to catch up any longer, as if we’d traveled so far in our lives without each other that there was no common ground between us any more, that the life we’d been meant for had passed us by and we were forever trapped in the lives that we had now.

I did neither of those things. After he arrived with gifts for my mother and Manfredi and Mafalda, after he’d been re-introduced to the garden, the balustrade, the old view of the sea, he drew me down to sit with him face-to-face at my mother’s dining table, our knees very close but no part of us touching. 

We were served with coffee and honey and _tortelli cremaschi_. The drowsy sounds of cicadas drifted through the open French windows.

Finally he said, “I’d forgotten how much I loved this place, how happy I was here.” He placed his open palms face up on the table, pale from twenty New England winters. “But there’s something I didn’t forget, Oliver.”

This open declaration of intent surprised me, not least because he'd been the one to speak first. We had spent so much of our time together in guarded silence, trying to discern meaning from the smallest gestures, like the knight from my mother’s Heptameron who didn’t manage to speak before he died. Perhaps he thought I knew. To be fair to him, when I was seventeen I had the tendency to overthink and overscrutinize, to guess and then second-guess. 

On reflection, perhaps it was a tendency I had carried into later life as well.

“And here I was thinking you had forgotten.”

He took my hand and I let him. “I haven’t forgotten. I’m like you, I remember everything.”

A cloudless sky, a red swimming suit, a shirt thrown on carelessly. The billowing curtains of his room that once was mine. Trekking under the cascade of the Alpi Orobie. Being carried by poetry and music and the story of San Clemente on the cobbled streets of an old city.

“I made a choice twenty years ago, and then I made a terrible mistake. It threw my life off course, and not just my life. I never told you how sorry I was the last time we saw each other.”

In fact, he had never told me so before. He had assumed I couldn't forgive him because I couldn't bring myself to have dinner with him that last time, or to speak, not even when he told me that he'd continued to hold our summer in his heart of hearts. 

I spoke now: a frigid winter's chill. "It’s not me you have to be sorry for."

He scrubbed his free hand through his hair. There were more sunspots on the back of that hand than there'd been five years ago; more gray in his still-thick hair. “I know," he muttered. "I've left New Hampshire. I'm moving to Rome. I’m trying to make it right with her and with the boys, who are now away at school. But I've left for good."

On the one hand, this was a surprise. I'd assumed he would always stay in the marriage he'd chosen, even if he'd never been entirely committed to it, even if he'd come to think of it as a mistake — he had always tried to be a good person; he was the best person I'd ever known. But on the other hand, I'd always known that he had left the best part of himself in Italy, and that one day he would return to reclaim it. 

Perhaps he would let himself lay claim to something else that had been left here, together with the life he could have had and the person he should have been.

I knew he could see the revelation go through me. He continued, as if speaking continued to be difficult: "And for you, is there anyone—?”

“No. Not that it matters. But not any more. They could never compare.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again; the second time in two decades. I could hear the regret of those twenty years, as clear as the bells of Crema's town hall.

Our world might not have stayed the same as it had been twenty years ago, but it hadn't changed beyond all recognition either. It was neither one nor the other, but something different, something new. 

“Don’t be. You’re here now. Show me you truly remember.”

His old room had been made ready, the room that had once been mine, and I took him by the hand and led him into the bed, which, as the hazy golden afternoon shaded into evening, we made ours again. 

It had been twenty years, and in all that time he hadn't made love to another man. He had saved that for me, and I didn't mean to squander it. I pushed him down and showed him I remembered how he liked it.

I was so famished for him that I got off to a premature start; he was so afraid of doing something wrong that he had difficulties getting to any start at all. 

"Am I hurting you?"

I thought, You hurt me twenty years ago, nothing you do now could hurt as much, but I knew that if I said that he would stop, and I believed he might kill me if he stopped. I kissed him everywhere, and slowly, his body remembered, and awakened to itself and to mine at last. 

We would never be the same as when we'd been two young men in love for the first time. We'd never have the life we could have had if he hadn’t left me at the Stazione di Clusone. But that was not to say we could not find our way to another new life together that was equally as right for us.

It was late when we finally emerged for dinner. My mother and her caretaker had gone to bed. Mafalda had left stew, and a vintage Sassicaia, and an apricot cake. We couldn't eat much; we were satiated with love, which was the food of the gods, and still not quite able to believe the unexpected oasis which we had found our way to at last.

After dinner, we walked out to the rocky beach. The stars in the balmy night sky gave up their treasure. There was a faint light further along the shoreline, brightening the dark horizon of the sea like Alexandria's fabled lighthouse, guiding lost travelers to safer shores.

He told me, "Every year, on your birthday — the sixteenth — I'd set aside an evening to think of this. Of where you were, and what you were doing, and who you had become. Whether you still thought about me. Your father would say it was a vigil of some kind."

Last year on my birthday I'd been in Paris, very drunk, trying to convince Michel that we should try again. I would have sworn Oliver had been the last thing on my mind, but perhaps I would have been wrong. Underneath the soil and bedrock of my quotidian life ran the rich vein of that summer with Oliver, a river from the Alpi Orobie that flowed through everything. 

Could we have reached this shore any earlier, taking different turns on the forking pathways of our lives? What if Oliver had chosen not to marry Micol after all, or to leave her when I came to see him in New Hampshire? And if he had, would I have left him in my turn, restless for yet another life and another love, destroying his family twice over? 

All the paths taken and the paths not taken had led us to this place, to this new life. Who was to say this was not the best one after all?

“Are you staying?” I asked him finally. Staying in Italy, the home of philosophers and the monument to the soldiers of the Piave, where he might find his way toward the life of art and poetry that he had found in Bergamo, which I had made my own home. What had been given to us that summer might have been given once only, but there was nothing to stop us from discovering something new in those stars and in ourselves. 

He smiled at me. In his eyes was a voyage home. “Yes, if you’ll have me. I’m home at last, with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my betas, Kainosite and Miss M! The title is a Greek term which, [according to Homer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostos), reflects a hero’s return home by sea. Phrases and events borrowed from the novel and its sequel, _Find Me_.


End file.
